Egon

Bleary-eyed from lack of sleep, you stumble down the stairs and open the door. Egon bursts in purposefully, deposits his bag of fish entrails on the table in the hallway and, with little more than a how d'ye do, makes a bee-line for the kitchen.

By the time you join him in the kitchen, Egon is already ensconced at the breakfast bar, simultaneously unscrewing the lid from the coffee jar and popping a bagel into the toaster. He turns as you enter, increases the radius of his smile and cheerily asks why you look like shit. You try to explain that you have had a good 20 seconds less sleep than you can usefully function on (five seconds late getting in, followed by a further loss of fifteen seconds on an unscheduled bowel evacuation), but Egon dismisses this with a wave of his hand as "mere detail" and asks you where the bacon is hiding (It might appear that Egon was fond of breakfasts. Appearances, in this case, would be wrong).

You inform Egon for the umpteenth time that you are a Jewish vegetarian and that there is no bacon in the house.

"No, seriously" Egon eggs you on, undeterred.

"It's in the outhouse" you reply glumly.

"The outhouse? Sod that for a game of commandoes!" Egon laughs, deftly catching the two bagel halves as they pop from the toaster, blackened nicely. "I'll just make do with what I've got already. Oh, by the way", he adds, almost as an afterthought, "you couldn't run out to the outhouse and get me some bacon, could you?"

Dolefully you slip on a housecoat which has been lying in the washing machine for five days in the as-yet-unfulfilled expectation of being washed, and head out of the rear door into the yard. You make your way across the moss-bedecked back yard towards the outhouse.

The outhouse comprises an old king-sized bedsheet thrown across a clothes line and held taut at both sides with a selection of boulders and discarded bricks which had been thrown through your bedroom window over the weeks. It is striped red and white like a barber's pole, and flutters slightly in the wind. From where you stand you can hear Egon stirring his coffee and scraping the bagel soot onto your kitchen floor.

Life, you think to yourself, is good.

It is not until you enter the outhouse that you realise something is not quite right.

1. the bacon is gone. Oh dear, Egon won't be pleased
2. Egon is already in there
3. the radio in the outhouse has been left on

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